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Thursday, March 28, 2013

Charter Schools yeah right!

By Allan Alach

To no-one’s surprise the Ombudsman has found that John Banks, the
‘official’ champion of charter schools (yeah, right - another story), had
withheld information without valid reason, including:

﻿

Groucho understands John Banks!

‘Charter schools would get money for set up costs and
property funding that their private-sector backers would be able to keep if a
school folded.’

Excuse me?Overseas corporates will get paid to set up
regimes to enable them to take profits from New Zealand children?Risk free and taxpayer funded? Warner Bros deal,
with added extras? Heard of the Robertson
Foundation?

“The Robertson Foundation is one of the new
breed of so-called ‘philanthrocapitalists’, private sector investment funds and
trusts that view charity not as altruistic giving, but as just another
business investment opportunity to influence government policy and the delivery
of public education. And, to do so by lobbying behind closed doors, completely
outside the democratic process.’ (John
Minto)

Ring any bells for
you?

However the underlying
issue isn’t so much as charter schools and shady deals, but the government’s
overall education agenda.

There is no problem
with New Zealand education, other than those imposed by politicians and the
unseen influences behind them.

One rule for the rich!!!

There wasn’t any
problem with New Zealand education in 1987 either, but then, as now, problems
were created - a standard disaster capitalism technique, through using or
creating a ‘crisis’ to justify privatisation.

National standards
have been, and still are, the government’s trump card in justifying ‘reform.’

It is vital to their
agenda that these standards are manipulated to show two things: New Zealand
schools have been failing to lift ‘achievement’ and that National’s policies
since 2009 have started to address this.

Over the last few
months a disturbing trend has become apparent. In order to explain this, it is
first necessary to review the national standards processes that are in
presently in place - apologies if the next section gets technical.

Readers may not be
aware that back in 1999, the then Minister of Education, Nick Smith, had
signalled, in a never-to-be forgotten and truly mind boggling rant at the NZEI
Annual Meeting, that national testing would be developed should National win
the 1999 election. Seems a mother he met at the local market had complained
about not knowing how her kids were doing at school…

Since National lost
the election, we were spared the testing regime, only for a variation to reappear
in 2009. Same agenda, different delivery.

This variation chose
to establish ‘national standards’ of achievement in literacy and numeracy for
all public school children commencing from the end of the first three years of
schooling, and for each level from year 4 onwards. It is has never been
explained why these have been deemed as not necessary for private schools and
now charter schools.

The very short time
frame for the development of national standards, combined with their dubious
educational value, resulted in considerable fall out in the Ministry of
Education. This led to the departures of many of the key people behind the
development of the New Zealand Curriculum, and, presumably, their replacement
by more compliant staff.

﻿

Agree or I let you go!

Recent news about problems
within the Ministry is not surprising. Guess there’s a price to pay for
demanding adherence to politically imposed and educationally suspect policies.

Given the decision not
to test children, the government chose to require all classroom teachers to
‘assess’ each child’s achievement against relevant standards using their
‘overall teacher judgement,’ (OTJ) based on evidence collected over the year,
and comparing this with published exemplars - a very time consuming process.This process was not based on research
evidence and has resulted in ‘square peg in round hole’ syndrome that has left
New Zealand and international assessment experts rather bemused.

This syndrome has
resulted in two predictable problems:

Problem number one:
teachers are required to use their judgement (a necessarily subjective process)
to rate each child’s achievement for reporting purposes.

This leaves us to the
conundrum that teachers have to use a subjective judgement to get an objective
outcome.

Problem number two:
Since teacher judgements are subjective, then it is necessary for there to be a
moderation process, so teachers of similarly aged children in the same school
establish some level of consistency with their judgements. Several meetings
needed.

So far, so good, and
in fact these kind of moderation processes have been used in schools for many
years, although not overburdened by sheer volume of national standards.

But….. while teachers
of similar class levels can relatively easily moderate judgements, there also has
to be moderation with teachers of older and younger classes, so that there is
internal consistency throughout the school. More meetings.

Whew, after many
meetings, reviewing judgements in reading, writing and mathematics, each school
should now be satisfied that the national standards rankings for all children
are ‘accurate.’

Not so fast - how can
each school be certain that their internal rankings are consistent with
neighbouring schools? Or with schools across the country, in city or rural
areas?The impossibility of nationally
moderated should be obvious to all but the ideologically blind.

Or is this the case?
Are these ideologues really blind to the problems?

How have schools
tended to cope with the challenges, both with workload, and with moderation?

Many/most have fallen
back to pre-existing tests, developed for diagnostic, not ranking purposes, but
which do provide a basis for national comparisons.

STAR (Supplementary Test of Achievement in Reading) was developed by the New
Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER) over a decade ago, and has
recently been upgraded.

Another test, e-asTTle
(electronic - assessment Tools for Teaching and Learning - an acronym that helps explain dazed looks in teachers’
eyes) is more recent, and provides foronline assessment of reading,
writing and mathematics.

Future articles will
explore the implications of online assessment and link this to some very
worrying developments in USA.

The third test, still
widely used, is one familiar to many who have long left primary schooling - the
Progressive Achievement Tests (P.A.T.).

This now means that a
national test programme is developing by default as schools strive to be as
accurate and fair as possible with the assessments of all children’s achievement,
and as an inevitable response to workload issues. Teachers don’t have time to
spend hours on OTJs and moderation meetings, preferring to put their efforts
into planning and teaching. Fair enough.

There’s a very big BUT
here. Towards the end of 2012 schools found that their students’ nationally
benchmarked scores on these tests had mysteriously jumped, so that the bulk of
children were now achieving relevant national standards. A principal of a lower
decile school has suddenly found that the majority of his school’s pupils were
now at the national standards in reading according to STAR results.

Two possible reasons
for this: the first being that all schools had now become extremely effective
due to the benefits of national standards, while the second, for the more
cynical ones amongst us, is that something untoward had happened to the tests.

And this has turned
out to be the case. The way test scores are normed has been changed for both
STAR and e-assTTle, so that children are now shown as achieving at a higher
level. Instant fix.

This then will reflect
on school’s national standards results that are submitted to the Ministry of
Education, and then published in league tables by the media.

This year’s results
will be submitted to the ministry in early 2014, will be available to the media
some months before the election and will inevitably be compared to previous
years’ results.Surprise, surprise,
national standards results will show that New Zealand schools are now much more
effective at raising achievement, just time for the election campaign.

Trust me !

Is that rat starting
to smell yet? There’s an even bigger and nastier rat in the cupboard - the
subject of the next article.

‘The
politicians want to free up the tests so certain actions by the review office
or by the Wellington bureaucrats can move the results up or down for advantage
in the election cycle.’

And;

﻿

Who would take advice from a failing minister?

“This is the Novopay of testing:
old reliables (for instance, PAT) have been distorted by the high stakes'
national standards environment; and now we have this colossal mess up with two
widely used literacy markers, and Parata calls this 'quality data'. We had
quality data, now we have the rubbish.”

2 comments:

As the saying goes 'when you are up to your backside in alligators it's hard to remember you came to drain the swamp'. And, as well, many principals are unaware where the governments agenda is taking them - same thing I suppose - too distracted.